UC San Diego Robots Take Center Stage at National Robotics Conference

Robots created by UC San Diego engineers made their way to Austin, Texas recently. They took center stage during NI Week, the annual robotics extravaganza hosted by National Instruments.

During the keynote address, Tom Bewley, a mechanical and aerospace engineering professor at the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering, and his Ph.D. students Christopher Schmidt-Wetekam and Nick Morozovsky of the UCSD Coordinated Robotics Lab, gave live demonstrations of their third generation multimodal hopping rover, iHop, and their miniature treaded rover, Switchblade, which can both pop wheelies and climb relatively large stairs. Both designs feature advanced feedback control algorithms to stabilize various maneuvers, trading off static stability for enhanced agility.

The team also introduced iceCube, a self-propelled, self-guided sphere, which is actuated via internal control moment gyros and was designed and built by Ph.D. student Andrew Cavender.

View a video of the demos and keynote address here or at
http://zone.ni.com/wv/app/doc/p/id/wv-1705/upvisited/y

The video is about 12 minutes long. If you have just a few moments, check out the "Switchblade" rover at the 10:00 minute marker in the video. You'll get to see Switchblade pop a wheelie AND climb translucent stairs.

New Video: Computer Scientists Demo Voting Machine Vulnerability

Computer scientists demonstrated that criminals could hack an electronic voting machine and steal votes using a malicious programming approach that had not been invented when the voting machine was designed. The team of scientists from University of California, San Diego, the University of Michigan, and Princeton University employed “return-oriented programming” to force a Sequoia AVC Advantage electronic voting machine to turn against itself and steal votes. Read the academic paper and learn about the computer scientists at https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/groups/security/avc/





the same video is also available via YouTube:

Voting security video interview with Hovav Shacham

Above is a four minute video on voting machine security from Hovav Shacham, a UC San Diego computer science professor. Shacham and colleagues presented this work on Monday August 10, 2009 at the 2009 Electronic Voting Technology Workshop / Workshop on Trustworthy Elections (EVT/WOTE 2009), the premier academic forum for voting security research.

The same video is also up on YouTube:

Images: Computer Scientists Take Over Electronic Voting Machine with New Programming Technique

Above are the three images from the pape“Can DREs Provide Everlasting Security? The Case of Return-Oriented Programming and the AVC Advantage” by Stephen Checkoway,University of California, San Diego; Ariel J. Feldman, Princeton University; Brian Kantor, University of California, San Diego; J. Alex Halderman, University of Michigan; Edward W. Felten, Princeton University; Hovav Shacham, University of California, San Diego.

The computer scientists presented this work on August 10, 2009 at the 2009 Electronic Voting Technology Workshop / Workshop on Trustworthy Elections (EVT/WOTE 2009), the premier academic forum for voting security research.

Digital Dandelions Set in Stone...Literally

"Digital dandelions" popped up all across the Internet almost exactly two years ago, when computer science researchers from UC San Diego presented a paper at 2007 SIGCOMM called,
“Orbis: Rescaling Degree Correlations to Generate Annotated Internet Topologies.”

The big idea: What looks like the head of a digital dandelion is a map of the Internet generated by new algorithms from computer scientists at UC San Diego. This map features Internet nodes – the red dots – and linkages – the green lines. But it is no ordinary map. It is a (mostly) randomly generated graph that retains the essential characteristics of a specific corner of the Internet but doubles the number of nodes.

Now, the digital dandelions have been set in stone...literally. The Computer Science Department at University College London liked the depictions of Internet topology and their resemblance to “digital dandelions” so much that they commissioned artist Hannah Griffiths to create a mosaic based on these depictions and have it on display in their new building.

The Department Head of CS at UCL, Anthony Finkelstein, forwarded the images to AminVahdat, the computer science professor at UC San Diego who led the research. Vahdat posted the images on his "Idle Process" blog. One of the images is above...but check out Idle Process for the rest.

The authors on the 2007 SIGCOMM paper about the digital dandelions are: Priya Mahadevan, Calvin Hubble and Amin Vahdat from UCSD’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering; and Bradley Huffaker and Dimitri Krioukov from CAIDA, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis which is based at the University of California’s San Diego Supercomputer Center.

One of the images from the original UC San Diego press release, and a quote from the first author, are below.

Defending against denial of service attacks and large-scale worm outbreaks depends on network topology. Our work allows computer scientists to experiment with a range of random graphs that match Internet characteristics. This work is also useful for determining the sensitivity of particular techniques – like routing protocols and congestion controls – to network topology and to variations in network topology,” said Priya Mahadevan, the first author on the SIGCOMM 2007 paper. Mahadevan completed her computer science Ph.D. at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering in 2007 and joined Hewlett Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, CA.

TowerMadness Developers

Iman Mostafavi (above) is a computer science Ph.D. student at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. He is one of three developers of the hot iPhone game, TowerMadness. It is one of the most cheat-resistant iPhone games around.




Arash Keshmirian (left) is a UC San Diego computer science BS/MS alumnus who is now a Silicon-Valley based entrepreneur and consultant. Arash is a developer of TowerMadness.




Volker Schönefeld is a former visiting graduate student to UC San Diego’s computer science department who is completing his doctoral degree at RWTH Aachen University, in Aachen Germany. Volker is a developer of TowerMadness. The game's cheat resistance features grew out of replay technology Schönefeld pioneered in 2003 for Waaagh!TV, his e-Sports broadcasting company. Waaagh!TV develops software that allows thousands of users to simultaneously watch live online matches of the popular computer game Warcraft III.

iPhone game that is tough on cheaters

I just posted a story about TowerMadness, an iPhone game created by three computer scientists with ties to UC San Diego's computer science department. If you are a gamer, you'll love the 3D graphics and the sophistication of the aliens in TowerMadness...they are much smarter than your average iPhone "bad guys".

But there is much more to this game. The press release focuses on how computer science PhD student Iman Mostafavi, computer science alumnus (BS/MS) Arash Keshmirian, and former computer science visiting student Volker Schönefeld created one of the most cheat-resistant iPhone games. Their strategies is tied to technologies Volker Schönefeld developed for his e-Sports broadcasting company Waaagh!TV.